Electronic communications using email are a popular method of communication between users. Many users of email send and receive megabytes worth of email on a daily basis—a fact that can strain network bandwidth, as well as storage facilities.
Exacerbating the difficulties inherent in facilitating email communication is email history, especially multiple levels of history. Many email programs either automatically or by virtue of a user's setting automatically include all history in a current email chain. In an extensive chain of emails, including forwarded emails and replies, an individual email can quickly require significant bandwidth and storage for aged or dated information.
Manually deleting history can reduce this problem, but many users either do not engage in this additional effort, or do not worry about any strain on the network. Further, many users do not perceive any value gained by pruning history, and others simply do not grasp how sizable an email becomes after multiple responses. Similarly, a strict bar on including history can have unintentional and undesired effects, including potentially stifling communication while adding to a user's workload.
A technology that can identify the history within an email would assist in obtaining improved system performance.
As used throughout this disclosure, the term ‘levels’, as applied to discussing levels of email history, means at least a portion of a discrete response that was previously sent by one user of an email system to at least one other user of the email system. An email can contain no levels of response history, or any number of levels. The ‘first level’of response history is the first response to an originating email—an email that is not a reply or forward. Similarly, the ‘second level’ of response history is a response or forward of the first level.
It is therefore a challenge to develop a method to parse emails to overcome these, and other, disadvantages.